- Three cargo ships struck off Iran’s coast, UK says, including one in Strait of Hormuz
Source: CNBC
“Three vessels off Iran’s coast have been struck by projectiles, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said on Wednesday, the latest in a flurry of incidents reported in or near the Strait of Hormuz. One of the ships reported it had been struck 11 nautical miles north of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, causing a fire onboard and forcing the crew to evacuate, the UKMTO said, without identifying the vessels. Two other incidents were also reported on Wednesday morning, with one vessel struck by a projectile about 50 nautical miles northwest of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and another sustaining damage off the coast of the UAE.” (03/11/26)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/cargo-ship-struck-strait-of-hormuz-uk-iran-war.html
- Dementia becomes leading cause of death in Australia as experts call for “shift in thinking” about disease
Source: Independent [UK]
“Dementia has become the leading cause of death in Australia, a development that has prompted public health experts to call for a ‘shift in thinking’ about the disease. An estimated 446,500 people in the country are living with the disease as of 2026, according to data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. … a 2024 survey found that more than a quarter of Australians incorrectly believed there was nothing they could do to reduce their risk of dementia. … Estimates suggest that about two in five dementia cases in the country can be prevented.” (03/11/26)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/dementia-australia-top-death-cause-b2936066.html
- US mortgage applications increase 3.2% amid market volatility
Source: HousingWire
“Mortgage applications increased 3.2% from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) weekly mortgage applications survey for the week ending March 6, 2026. On an unadjusted basis, the index increased 4.1% compared with the previous week. The refinance index 0.5% from the previous week and was 81% higher than the same week one year ago. The refinance share of mortgage activity decreased to 57.8% of total applications from 59.8% the previous week.” (03/11/26)
- Nigeria: At least 65 regime troops killed in jihadist raids
Source: The Guardian [UK]
“At least 65 Nigerian soldiers have been killed in jihadist raids across the country’s north-east in the last two weeks, as the west African state battles to contain one of the world’s deadliest terror groups. On 5 and 6 March, gunmen from Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) overran four military bases in Borno state, the epicentre of the insurgency. Nigerian daily the Punch reported that about 40 soldiers were killed in total in these attacks. In a statement on 7 March, the same day a mass funeral was held for the fallen troops, the military disputed the death toll but did not provide an alternative number. … Last month, 200 US troops arrived in northern Nigeria to train their counterparts, weeks after the US president, Donald Trump, announced airstrikes on terrorist elements in the region.” (03/11/26)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/nigerian-soldiers-killed-jihadist-raids-north-east
- AZ: Trump regime opens “investigation” into 2020 election results
Source: ABC News
“The Department of Homeland Security’s investigations arm is investigating [sic] 2020 election results in Arizona, the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, and a source familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News on Tuesday. It is not typical for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to investigate election results, though the agency has investigated voter fraud cases in the past. The agency serves as the investigative arm of DHS and usually investigates transnational crime, including drug smuggling and human trafficking. … Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to relitigate the 2020 election, Biden won the election by 7 million votes, including winning six out of the seven battleground states. The overall electoral count was 306 to 232.” (03/11/26)
- Germany: Pols debate return to nuclear energy
Source: Deutsche Welle [German state media]
“At a nuclear summit near Paris earlier this week, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the move away from nuclear energy made by some European Union countries as a ‘strategic mistake.’ Nuclear power, she explained, is a ‘reliable, affordable source of low-emission electricity.’ The head of the EU Commission announced new financial aid for such power plants. Von der Leyen’s words reverberated in Germany, which switched off its last nuclear reactor in 2023. … However, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) said on Tuesday that previous federal governments had decided to phase out nuclear energy, and that rolling back this decision was not possible. He added, however: ‘I regret this, but it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.'” (03/11/26)
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-debates-return-to-nuclear-energy/a-76305267
- Amazon: We don’t want people to buy stuff from us. Judge: OK!
Source: PCMag
“Amazon has secured a major win in its lawsuit against Perplexity. A federal judge has ordered Perplexity to block its AI agents from placing orders on Amazon without permission. In the lawsuit filed in November, Amazon accused Perplexity of using its Comet AI browser to covertly access the Amazon website and users’ accounts to place orders on their behalf. Before filing the complaint, Amazon had also sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter accusing it of disguising Comet as Chrome to ensure its AI agents could avoid detection. … Amazon has welcomed the preliminary injunction. … For the e-commerce giant, the case could also be about protecting its advertising revenue. As Bloomberg notes, Amazon earned $68 billion from ads last year, as brands are still willing to pay huge sums for prime visibility across the platform. If customers purchase products without visiting the website, that revenue could take a hit.” (03/11/26)
- UK: Police Ban Pro-Iranian London March
Source: US News & World Report
“British police said they had banned a pro-Iranian march due to take place in London on Sunday, citing the possibility of ‘extreme tensions’ with counter-protesters and the risk posed by Tehran during the conflict in the Middle East. The Al Quds march in central London is organised annually by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which the police said was supportive of the Iranian regime. The threshold to ban a protest is high in Britain, with the police saying this was the first time the power had been invoked in 14 years, but the risks of public disorder were ‘so severe’ it was right to block it. The ban also applies to any counter-protest marches.” (03/11/26)
- MO: Federal jury awards $677,000 to Muslim men attacked by prison guards while praying
Source: The New Arab [UK]
“A federal jury on Monday awarded $667,000 in damages to a group of Muslim men incarcerated in Missouri who were pepper-sprayed by state correctional officers while praying. The lawsuit in eastern Missouri’s U.S. District Court alleged that the men had been allowed to pray together many times in their prison housing unit after the chapel was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The money will be distributed among eight men who were handcuffed, pepper-sprayed and placed in solitary confinement after praying in the housing area at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre on Feb. 28, 2021. Those who were placed in solitary confinement at the 2,684-bed facility were left without access to soap or running water to wash off the pepper spray, and some resorted to washing their faces with toilet water, according to the lawsuit.” (03/10/26)
https://www.newarab.com/news/jury-awards-667k-muslims-pepper-sprayed-prison-guards
- NH: Democrat wins previously GOP state House seat, notching 10th straight special election flip
Source: The Downballot
“The third time was the charm for New Hampshire Democrat Bobbi Boudman, who flipped a Republican-held seat in the state House in a special election on Tuesday night. Boudman, a financial analyst, defeated Republican Dale Fincher, a Christian nonprofit speaker and investment firm founder, by a 52-48 margin to win Carroll County’s 7th District. … Since the start of Trump’s second term, Republicans have flipped zero Democratic seats.” (03/10/26)
https://www.the-downballot.com/p/breaking-democrats-win-gop-seat-in
- But What About China? A Response to Tariff Advocates
Source: The Daily Economy
by David Hebert“Erratic tariff policy is alienating our allies, weakening exactly the coalition we’d need to address Beijing’s behavior.” (03/11/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/but-what-about-china-a-response-to-tariff-advocates/
- Why Hezbollah’s “irrational” gambit against Israel makes sense
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Ali Rizk“It is fighting for the survival of the organization and of Shiites there, and in the region. The US would be wise not to get sucked into this conflict, too.” (03/11/26)
- The Tea Party Stumbled So That MAGA Could Fall
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Alan Mosley“Political movements often begin as revolts against entrenched power, only to be absorbed by the very institutions they sought to challenge. The pattern is familiar in American political history. Grassroots insurgencies ignite public enthusiasm, mobilize voters around neglected issues, and briefly threaten the ruling consensus. Yet over time they are either neutralized or transformed into instruments of the existing political order. Two movements defined the political awakening of many Americans in the early twenty-first century: the Tea Party and the MAGA movement. Both promised a revolt against Washington. Both claimed to represent ordinary Americans against an unaccountable ruling class. Both attracted millions of supporters who believed they were witnessing the birth of something genuinely transformative. Yet both ultimately failed.” (03/11/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-tea-party-stumbled-so-that-maga-could-fall
- Congressional Republicans and the Ministry of Truth Social
Source: The Dispatch
by Jonah Goldberg“Let’s state the obvious: We’re at war with Iran. My evidence? Turn on your TV. U.S. forces, working with Israel, killed the supreme leader of Iran and many of his top aides. We sank Iran’s navy and destroyed most of its air force. We bombed thousands of military sites across the region. President Donald Trump, the commander in chief, has demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ from Iran. He routinely refers to this as a ‘war.’ Pete Hegseth, who calls himself the secretary of war, also describes this as a war daily, such as last week when he said, ‘We set the terms of this war.’ The truth that we are at war is so simple that only politicians and lawyers could make it seem complicated. Indeed, a slew of Republican legislators insist we’re not actually at war.” (03/11/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/iran-war-congressional-republicans-declaration/
- War with Iran: Making the Same Mistakes All Over Again, or a Host of New Ones?
Source: Antiwar.com
by Cody Morgan“For anyone looking into the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, what’s laid bare is not a history of friendship, diplomacy, and mutual respect, but rather a past marked with covert action, harsh rhetoric, and now, hot war.” (03/11/26)
- Copyright Bullying vs. Religious Freedom
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Kit Walsh“EFF’s client, J. Doe, is a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who became interested in the history of the organization’s public statements, and how they’ve changed over time. They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. … There is no law against questioning the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Instead, Watch Tower argues that Doe’s activities constitute copyright infringement and seeks to use the special process provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to unmask them. It sent DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare, seeking information that would help them uncover Doe’s identity. The problem for Watch Tower is that Doe’s research and commentary are clear fair uses allowed under copyright law.” (03/10/26)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/copyright-bullying-vs-religious-freedom-0
- It’s a War With Iran, Not an “Intervention”
Source: The Intercept
by Séamus Malekafzali“Elected officials desperately want to cast our war with Iran as an ‘intervention’ or ‘operation.’ Don’t let them get away with it.” (03/10/26)
- Who’s That Source? Iran Edition
Source: Racket News
by Jillian Butler“Analysts from Washington think tanks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have appeared dozens of times in the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, and Bloomberg as subject matter experts on the Iran War — and counting. While they are usually presented as neutral policy experts, their funding structures and advocacy histories are rarely disclosed. As the United States moves deeper into conflict, the public conversation is increasingly shaped by experts whose institutions are funded by donors with clear interests. The question is not whether these institutions produce substantive research. Many do. The question is whether readers are given sufficient context to understand the financial and political ecosystems in which that research is produced.” (03/10/26)
- Upholding Liberal Education
Source: Liberal Currents
by Christopher M Cruz“A genuinely liberal education is about freedom, and not in some utilitarian or sophomoric sense of freedom as a rejection of form or boundaries. The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it. Such a vision of education advances an inward concern as opposed to the more technical processes typically promoted in teacher education.” (03/10/16)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/upholding-liberal-education/
- The End of “Legitimacy”
Source: Persuasion
by Sam Kahn“We’re no longer in the domain of the Pax Americana, where the West’s gains at the end of World War II, and then at the end of the Cold War, are vigorously defended (even if the defense of the North Atlantic sometimes extended all the way to Afghanistan) with the premise that many of those gains are as much about principles — universal human rights, the rule of law — as territory. We’re also no longer in the kind of sovereignty that the Russians sometimes facetiously proposed — and that Trump not so long ago seemed interested in — where national autonomy is paramount regardless of sticky annoyances like human rights; or where, in an alternative version of the same theory, powers have exclusive control over their regional sphere of influence.” (03/10/26)
- France, America, and the Trap of Extended Nuclear Deterrence
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Galen Carpenter“French leaders and the French people should be very cautious about embracing extended deterrence obligations. Primary deterrence — threatening nuclear retaliation for an attack on one’s own country — has a high level of credibility, so long as the country has the necessary weaponry to mount a serious counterstrike. Indeed, the main point of the Cold War era’s de facto doctrine of mutual assured destruction was based on that logic. The credibility of courting similar devastation in response to an aggressor’s attack on another country — even a close ally of the defender — has always had much lower credibility.” (03/10/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/france-america-and-the-trap-of-extended-nuclear-deterrence/
- The Political Orphanage, 03/11/26
Source: The Political Orphanage
“A.I. and the Future of Scams.” (03/11/26)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/ai-and-the-future-of-scams
- The Kyle Anzalone Show, 03/10/26
Source: Libertarian Institute
“Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski: Operation Epic Failure: Trump’s War in Iran Is NOT Going As Planned.” (03/10/26)
- Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 03/11/26
Source: Antiwar.com
“US-Israeli Strikes Hit Civilian Targets Across Iran, Coalition To End Draft Registration, and More.” (03/11/26)
- Politics Politics Politics, 03/10/26
Source: Politics Politics Politics
“The Dumb State of Iran Discourse. Scoping Out Trump’s Wartime Deadlines (with Kirk Bado).” (03/10/26)
https://www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/p/the-dumb-state-of-iran-discourse
- Free Speech Unmuted, 03/10/26
Source: Hoover Institution
“Equal Time, Stephen Colbert, and the Future of Political Broadcasting | Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer.” (03/10/26)